


Ding-Dongs, Merrily on High

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Holiday Festivity, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, The Author Does Not Condone Smoking MIstletoe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27865882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “I’m telling you, you can smoke it.”“You can’t smoke it.”“You definitely can,” Ryan insists. “I read on—uh, in a book I read. Think how cool these Christmas lights would look if we were blazed right now.”
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 50
Kudos: 241
Collections: Skeptic Believer Book Club Advent Calendar





	Ding-Dongs, Merrily on High

**Author's Note:**

> This is for day three of the bridge club fic advent calendar! I'll be posting some longer stuff later this month, but I've long wanted to try my hand at a few short and sweet little scenes under 1k and lately I feel surprisingly quite festive, so here we are. Thanks to Jo for giving this a quick once-over.
> 
> Please DO NOT smoke mistletoe, it is not safe and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even get you high, but this being fiction I pretend I do not see it.

*

“I’m telling you, you can smoke it.”

“You can’t smoke it.”

“You definitely can,” Ryan insists. “I read on—uh, in a book I read. Think how cool these lights would look if we were blazed right now.”

He saw it somewhere on the wilds of the internet, then, and that’s what makes Shane nervous. He’s seen Ryan play fast and loose with the definition of a reliable source before.

On the other hand, Shane’s already kind of drunk, and it’s been such a shitshow of a year that if he dies tonight, maybe it was fated to end like this: flat on his back on his living room floor, staring up the undercarriage of a misshapen Christmas tree, Ryan by his side.

“If you can find me solid proof in the next three minutes that crushing this up, rolling it, and smoking it _isn’t_ going to poison us, I will consider it. _Consider_ it.”

Ryan Googles furiously, giggling all the while.

*

So, it turns out you can smoke mistletoe. In theory.

 _Should_ you smoke it? Probably not. Will it cause gastrointestinal distress? Even odds, according to the National Poison Control Center. But it won’t kill them, and Shane has always firmly believed that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. 

If they end up shitting their brains out later, well, at least it was for science.

So Shane plucks the offending piece of mistletoe down from above his front door, the smug little bastard plant that almost got them good earlier and will now pay the price, and he chops it up into tiny pieces and he rolls it in a neat little joint and he lights that sucker _up_.

*

They’re back under the tree, because Ryan wants to look at the lights.

It’s a fire hazard, passing a lit joint between them so close to the dry underside of the tree, but Shane doesn’t care. The fabled high is real, and it hit hard and fast and _good_. Already he feels like liquid gold in a Jell-O mold, wobbly but still contained, shining from the inside out.

He looks over at Ryan, and Ryan’s shining too: the soft white lights of the tree, reflecting off his glasses, off the blinding bright glimmer of his smile. It’s like someone put a ring light around him, to make his outsides finally match his insides.

“You look angelic right now,” Shane says, before his brain can supply him with a good reason not to. Maybe this is, after all, what dying feels like.

Ryan glints at him again. “I think you’re _on high_. People are always hearing things on high this time of year, right? Angels. Ding-dongs.”

Shane snorts. “What the fuck?”

“You know, ding-dongs, merrily on high.” Ryan hums a few bars. Then, because Shane’s still not following, he positively yodels, “Gloo-ooooo-oooo-ria!”

“It's bells, stupid.” Shane shakes his head and takes the mistletoe joint when Ryan offers it. You know what? Angel status revoked. You’re a ding-dong.”

“You like it.”

Shane doesn’t have an answer for that, because of course he does. He sucks smoke in again, holds it there a good long while, and then lets it waft right up into the branches.

If he closes his eyes, it smells like a forest.

*

“Sing it for me.”

“Sing what?”

Ryan snickers. “The carol. The one with the ding-dongs.”

That one’s an old song, and Shane never went to church. But he played in the high school band, and that band was recruited for holiday assemblies and concerts from time to time, and he might remember some of the words.

He barely makes it past the first extended _gloria_ , his breath control just about giving out on him, before Ryan interrupts.

“Who’s Chelsea?”

Shane wheezes. “ _Hosanna in excelsis_. It means—not sure. Latin, right?”

“Something-something in the highest,” Ryan says. “I was just fucking with you, man.”

Shane long ago stopped being surprised by the random information that lives in Ryan’s head; by the things he knows that Shane doesn’t, or by the things he doesn’t know that Shane supposed was common knowledge.

“ _You’re_ the highest,” he says. Ryan laughs and rolls onto his side, a little closer.

“Maybe,” Ryan says. “Thanks for that. I like your voice.” He presses into the soft shoulder of Shane’s sweater, rubbing his cheek against it like a sleepy cat.

A little closer.

*

“Is this ‘cause it’s mistletoe?” Ryan asks, against his mouth.

Ryan’s a _lot_ closer.

Ryan’s on top of him.

Shane breaks away, looking up. The back of Ryan’s head is scraping the lowest branches of the Christmas tree, so it looks like he’s wearing a magnificent pine crown. Like a fairy king, a purveyor of magical herbs, something out of Shakespeare.

“You think because we smoked the mistletoe, it’s making us…”

Ryan shrugs. He bends down, chasing Shane’s mouth to kiss him again. He kisses slow and languid and careful, not like Shane thought it would be at all. Lazy, almost unconcerned, as if they’re caught outside time and consequence. Lovers in the forest.

Fuck, Shane’s _so_ high.

“I think mistletoe’s power is cultural, not medicinal.”

“Wrong again, big guy. They used it to treat infertility. Something about the berries.”

Shane groans in spite of himself when Ryan adjusts on top of him, bearing down with warm insistence and snaking his hands around Shane’s to pin him loosely by the wrists.

“Yeah, that scans,” he says, because he thinks he could just about bust through his chinos, and Ryan cackles.

His thumbs are warm against the inside of Shane’s wrists. Shane doesn’t recall ever being sensitive there, but whether it’s the joint or something else entirely, the barest _scrape_ of Ryan’s thumbnail has him digging his fingers into the cheap crushed velvet of the tree skirt. 

“Say stop if you wanna stop,” Ryan says, ragged, “otherwise—”

Shane knows they’re not going to stop. They’re high, but they can go higher.

*


End file.
